Everyday new technologies enter the market that bring new IT innovation and disruption to the digital landscape. In the past decade, hybrid cloud IT computing has helped businesses expand their processes. The reason many companies are adopting hybrid IT is for its heightened security, storage flexibility, and cost efficiencies. As more businesses jump on the hybrid bandwagon, the industry is shifting toward new cloud computing trends to adjust for the needs of its users and future growth.
Gartner predicts that spending on public cloud services will exceed $480 billion in 2022. But what does that mean for the future of hybrid IT? We’ve gathered five emerging trends to keep an eye on.
Trends shaping the future of public enterprise — Hybrid IT
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the state of business operations. While many companies closed their doors and shifted their workforce from on-site to remote, they were also forced to reconsider how they facilitated their company’s network, cyber security, and storage away from their “home” systems.
Instead of meeting in a breakout room, teams needed to collaborate on videoconferencing including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and more. Instead of relying on protected on-site IT services, IT professionals had to arm their remote colleagues with secure computers and cybersecurity training. Instead of adding the company information to their shared files, organizations required safe cloud storage to collaborate succinctly.
Five trends have surfaced as a result: composable business maturity, regional cloud ecosystems, sustainable cloud infrastructure, hyper-automation, and developing a single source of truth among a dispersed team.
1. Composable Business Flexibility — Agile Frameworks
2020 showed businesses the barriers they needed to overcome to be more resilient and agile. A composable business means planning for disruptive changes in the workforce. Leaders must be prepared to make changes to orchestrate favorable outcomes on a day-to-day or even annual basis.
Think of toy construction blocks: each piece is necessary to build the entire structure, but each block could be replaced to facilitate a better design when necessary.
2. Regional Cloud Ecosystems – Reduce Latency
Public cloud centers on a provider, like data centers, supplies the tools, space, security, and management you need to build a hybrid-enabled enterprise. Regional public cloud ecosystems avoid single points of failure from cloud providers outside of their region. Instead, cloud administrators can replicate services across geographic locations to reduce latency issues and protect their resources.
If there was a power outage, for example, cloud management could move their resources to another regional zone, thus reducing downtime.
3. Sustainability – Going Green
In spring 2021, Gartner found that 45% of CEOs and senior executives surveyed believed that climate change mitigation impacted their business. With many examples of extreme changes in the weather and climate in 2020, alone according to EcoWatch, businesses are taking note and adjusting their practices.
When it comes to data center hybrid IT practices, this means reducing energy used and finding more innovative ways to manage the carbon footprint of your company. Data center infrastructure management (DCIM) can help virtualize this effort with 2D or 3D heat mapping of underperforming computing stacks.
4. Hyper Automation
Rapidly identifying networking issues, understanding why and how the problem emerged and automating the solution is the best way to continue to scale a business’ data aggregation practices. Hyper Automation orchestrates multiple systems together from AI and cloud storage to robotic process automation (RPA) and integration platform as a service (iPaaS). This allows for more background automation growth without disrupting normal computing activities.
5. Developing A Single Source of Truth
To support dispersed teams and a growing cloud infrastructure, a single source of truth (SSOT) is increasingly vital. Enabling teams to access important information such as company templates or guidelines will streamline the public enterprise digital transformation. In turn, customers can rely on companies to provide reliable information.
The Data Center Role in Future Progress
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), spending on cloud computing infrastructure, storage and dedicated shared environment reached $15.1 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Data centers have always been a safe, controlled, and predictable infrastructure for high-risk assets. As enterprises push for agile practices, hybrid data centers will need to change alongside them.
Virtualization — Data Collection
Virtualization can help increase speed, innovation, and program deployment for businesses moving to the cloud. Across physical data centers and multi-cloud environments, developers are looking for both traditional IT and cloud computing to fit in their growing data collection. Virtualization servers are in the cloud and can be remotely managed and scaled. This reduces the number of physical servers and increases reliance on cloud networking.
Agile Business Practices To Scale
Organizations can adopt an agile approach to enable any application workload to move across networking infrastructure and servers located across multi-cloud environments and physical data centers. Data centers support this effort with full visibility and precise control over an increasingly complex network and cybersecurity landscape.
Hybrid data centers are set to play a vital role in future data, application and information management, storage and computing because of the scaling flexibility they already provide.
If you want to design and build a hybrid data center, contact an expert at Sabey to get started.
